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Friday, 14 June 2013

Formations, Positions, Match Engine

Hello everyone!

Today we are looking at the heart and soul of goalunited: the match engine; and to be more precise, the formations.

The goalunited match engine considers many big and small details about
your clubs, players and the set line-ups. Everything has an effect, and with
luck, can lead to the deciding chance. It is our clear intention that it is not
always the stronger team that wins a match, with the right tactic
and a little luck the weaker team always has a chance even against a clear
favourite. As a result of the high complexity of the match engine every change
that is implemented can have an effect on many other areas of the game, and are
never trivial.

We will use the GU next update to perform a few long planned changes to
the line-up and formation system and the match engine. Here we will also take
into consideration many suggestions from the community, like the request to
make wing players more important, as well as to allow them to play on the
complete sides on the field, including the defence.

Next to the upvaluing of the wing players we put great emphasis to allow
more realistic formations and to remove oddities of the match engine.

Formations

In the current system each possible position on the field has an
individual weighing of the player skills. This varies slightly from position to
position. The disadvantage of this system is that there are many positions on
which most of the players with “normal-weighted” skills cannot perform up to
their full potential. Many realistic standard formations are therefore not
easily manned.

Another reason for us to rethink the current system is to make it more
“newbie-friendly”: Many new managers are overwhelmed by the vast number of
variations in the positioning, especially since the advantages and
disadvantages are hard to grasp for a beginner.

In short: in the future it will not be possible anymore to simply
position your players on the field any way you want. Instead we will offer you
20+ fixed formations that are unlocked through the manager career system. These
will include standard formations like 4-4-2 and 3-4-3, but also more complex
and challenging formations. In the standard formations all players with “normal-weighted”
skills can play up to their full potential, in the more challenging formations
players with specialized training and repositioning will stand out.

The strategic possibilities that result from the perfect combinations of
players, formation, tactic and marking will stay unaffected. You will be able
to find at least one formation for every situation and even more important, you
will be able to place your players more efficiently.

Ill.: Selection of the formation in the line-up
screen (work in progress!)

When a
formation is selected the best 11 players will automatically be placed on the
field, alternatively the players you had placed on the field are repositioned
as possible.

Position
strength

The
coloured bar indicating the position suitability will be replaced by the
position strength. With this you will be able to see the true strength of the
players on their current positions. The player strength shown in the player
file and squad overview will, as always, show the ideal strength for the
assigned (standard) position.

Every
position in each available formation will have an individual skill weighing and
be therefore suitable for a specific player type. In some formations there will
also be positions that can be played on by one of two player types without
penalty (like wing player and defender).

Wing
players

Wing
players, which until now seemed to be disadvantaged, will be more diversely
usable with the new formations. Until now it seemed as if wing players trained
slower; that was not the case though and only appeared that way because wing
players train a wider range of skills. That however, is currently not taken
into consideration appropriately for the player strength calculation. This will
also be adjusted so that the values become comparable.

These
changes might seem radical and give the impression that we are removing an
important feature, but don’t panic!

You will have thousands of line-up
combinations with formations, tactics, players and marking.

There will be no more unrealistic and
weird formations.

Your players will be able to use
their skills more efficiently.

Setting line-ups will be more
comfortable and more transparent.

The match engine will be optimized
in many aspects

And last
but not least an important pointer: If you do not have any good wing players in
your team yet, now might be a good time to start looking for good talents and
to start promoting them.